My enthusiasm for The Elder Scrolls Online's competitive side doesn't stack up against the time I have spent feeling drained by drab questing or restricted by a world ensconced in fog.

This is an MMORPG of moderate scope with a few good ideas and the resources invested in it seem sufficient to expect new dungeons, daily quests and armour sets to collect at a decent clip for the next couple of months.

If you're tired of your current fantasy haunt and looking for somewhere to transfer your guild, this game may suit you for a time. For everyone else, though, I'd advise caution. There's no game that I'd be happy recommending on the basis that it's at best 'okay' for thirty-plus hours. 'Okay' isn't good enough when you're facing down this much of a premium, and I can't imagine paying a monthly fee to visit somewhere I've been many times before.

Two forthcoming things they mention - not in this patch though - are based on player feedback....

Dungeon Treasure Chests – Based on feedback, we are changing treasure chests in instanced dungeons so that everyone gets a piece of loot regardless of who opens the chest. This change is currently being implemented and tested internally and will be released in a future patch as soon as it’s ready. Watch the patch notes for the news.

Public Dungeon & Delve Boss Monsters – Also based on feedback, we will be placing a timer on how often you can get loot from public dungeon and delve boss monsters. This timer is shared across all boss monsters in public dungeons and delves. This will not impact loot timers for quest-specific monsters or overworld group bosses. Watch the patch notes for news on when this change will go live.

I can tell you where those lag spikes/freezes are coming from, both the launcher and awesomium.exe. I take my awesomium.exe and put it in my documents until update time and close my launcher while running the game. Its a back door fix, but its better then getting those spikes.

The game will create a empty folder called awesomium.exe if it finds your awseomium.exe missing. just delete that folder when you decide to put back your awesomeium.exe for when ESO does updates

As it’s now two and a half weeks since we officially launched on April 4, I think it’s a good time to bring everyone up to date on The Elder Scrolls Online service, maintenance windows, and what we’re doing to add content, make the game better, and address some issues that are near and dear to the community.

First and foremost, please know that we are doing everything we can to combat the gold spammers and bots – especially ones that “camp” dungeon bosses – that you see in game. I play the game every day; I see them too, and yes, they drive me crazy. We have had a daily running battle with them ever since the game launched – moving them from global chat, to in-game email, to creating bogus guilds and inviting players – and we continue to take measures to keep them away from players, even when it isn’t always apparent that we are. Most of the battle has been on the back end of the game – we regularly ban accounts involved in spam and bot activity – our teams are working on better systems to identify those accounts and characters that are doing black market activities, and we’re also working on some game feature refinement to make it harder for them to acquire gold in the first place. Fighting black market activity like gold selling spam and farming bots is a marathon, not a sprint, but we will do whatever we can to reduce their impact on the game.

The scope of the black market activity accounts for up to 85% of Customer Service emails/calls. Because of this huge influx of contact relating to this one issue, our CS team has been slower to react to other problems than planned – our sincere apologies if you have been held up for a long period of time waiting for CS to respond to you. Again, our goal is to keep this activity away from you so you don’t have to contact Customer Service in the first place.

Also very visible was last week’s gold “duping” (duplication) bug – where players could manipulate stacks of items in their inventory to create copies. We fixed the problem and banned the accounts of the worst offenders And yes, we erroneously caught up some legitimate accounts in that ban, for which we apologize – all erroneously banned accounts were reinstated within about 8 hours. Contrary to some reports, exploitation of this bug did not result in destabilizing the ESO economy in any way. We did turn off guild banks to limit the spread of the problem, but that was only until we put up a new version of the game that fixed the exploit later that evening.

All of these fixes have resulted in several more maintenance periods than we planned for – we know that everyone wants to play the game and hates downtime – but please be aware that every time we take down the servers for maintenance, it is either to fix a problem or put up an update that makes the game better. We are working on shortening the length of maintenances, this will get better over time.

So, here’s the list of our more prominent fixes since launch, as well as info about ongoing support that we’re doing for ESO:

Fixed the bug where a small percentage of players lost their expansion bank slots.
Fixed quest-blocking bugs, especially ones in Coldharbour, that prevented players from completing either a main quest step, or the Coldharbour zone.
Fixed many other quest bugs not related to the above where items/NPCs didn’t spawn properly.
Fixed the Greenshade (Aldmeri Dominion zone) problem, which caused the zone to crash every few hours. This one was fixed on 4/4, but was a problem during early access.
Fixed two dupe issues: the above one involving stacked items, and another (on a much smaller scale) involving crafting hireling emails.
Put many back-end fixes and procedures in place to block black market gold farmer activity.

We still have much to do – there still other quest problems on our fix list, most of them involving the situation where they become “de-synched” from the zone and don’t spawn their items or NPCs properly. We are in process of putting up our first major update to the game on our Play Test Server (PTS), which includes many updates to the game, including class and weapon ability tweaks, content fixes, and updates to almost all game systems. It also contains our new end-game Adventure Zone, Craglorn, with Veteran content aimed at 4 and 12-man groups. So stay tuned for PTS patch notes for all the other fixes that we’ve been working on. This is a major update to the game, so it will be on PTS for at least a week or 10 days for testing before we take it live.

We’re working on fixing problems, we’re combatting black market gold farmers, and we have a hefty new patch coming shortly. ESO is already an awesome game, and it will only get better from here. Thanks for your patience and support, and I’ll see you in Tamriel. - Matt

Maintenance for Patch 1.1.2 starts Thursday at 8AM EDT for the North American megaserver and 4AM CEST on Friday for the European megaserver.

Welcome to The Elder Scrolls Online v1.1.2. This version contains our first major content update: the Adventure Zone Craglorn, as well as many other fixes and refinements.

You’ll need allies to take on the new challenges—Craglorn’s quests and exploration are designed for groups of four Veteran Rank 10+ characters.
(You can enter Craglorn and play the content earlier than Veteran Rank 10.)

I don't know if that's bad news for the game (for the contract workers it is), because it sounds like it was CS. They anticipated needing more contract workers for a longer period of time for CS. Might be good news in terms of in-game issues.

Leonid Melikhov: What will the future of The Elder Scrolls Online be like in terms of post-launch content? There will be a heap of content for the collector’s editions and pre-order bonuses but what is next after that?

Paul D. Sage: There is a lot of things we’re looking into doing right now for post launch content. Obviously, we’re trying to keep a good pace for 4 to 3 weeks in between updates. We have those veteran dungeons that I’ve already talked about, but we are looking at things were looking at systematically and we want to see how the Veteran system works.

We’re looking at adding in the Justice system which is where players can steal from NPCs and the NPCs will react to that, I can kill NPCs and NPCs will react to that. The coolest thing I think about that system is because it’s online we can allow players to not just steal and kill, but they can also become guards and act in justice. So you’ll have a little bit of PvP in the real world in the Justice system.

we’ll be out in force at QuakeCon in Dallas from July 17th through the 20th.

Veteran Rank System

We’ve been listening to your feedback about ESO’s Veteran Rank content. Some of the issues are that it’s too much of a departure from the 1-50 experience, it’s much more “grindy,” it can be too difficult, and the rewards don’t match the effort you have to put in to progress. I’m very happy to say that we’ll be making a series of announcements (starting at QuakeCon) that will address problems with the Veteran System in ESO, leading to a much more compelling high-level PvE experience for everyone.

In the interim, we’ve implemented some balance changes to content in post-50 zones that will make it much more like the content from levels 1-50. Our goal is to remove the feeling of “I have just hit a wall of difficulty” that many of you have commented on—you’ll be able to solo much more easily.

One of the guiding principles of our Veteran gameplay was to encourage people (not force them) to group. We wanted people to be able to solo to max level, but still wanted you to participate in group content. This principle was the reason we made our post-50 zones more difficult; we wanted you to get together with others and take on tougher challenges. But this hasn’t been well-received. Many of you love the game you played from 1-50, and the Veteran-level zones are too much of a departure from that experience. We know you want the ability to continue participating in solo content as you progress through Veteran Ranks. This will occur over time, but the first few phases look like this:

Phase 1: Make sure the difficulty in Veteran zones ramps up slowly and rarely exceeds what a good player can do on their own. This change came to the live servers on July 7th. By the time you read this, you should be able to play Veteran content the same way you played from 1-50.

Phase 2: Remove the Veteran Points system and have normal experience gains direct the growth of the Veteran System. Also, we’ll increase the amount of XP granted in PvP. This will happen at some point over the summer as we transition to the new system.

Phase 3: Introduce a completely new Veteran System based on new character customization and growth mechanics. We’ll talk more about this in the near future—especially during Quakecon—but for now, be aware that we’re going to make some much-needed changes to post-50 PvE gameplay.

The primary reason for making these changes is to ensure that you have meaningful choices in the post-50 PvE game experience that reinforce the design idea that you can play the way you want to play.

Grouping updates – 5 initiatives underway to improve grouping
- Gamewide audit to fix quests so players aren’t separated so often
- More quests have shared advancement (one group member collecting items will give shared credit to the entire group)
- You will always be able to sync with your group leader’s instance.
- Journal and quest tracker to show common quests.
- Confirmation for quest sharing (success or fail)